Tilli

Research shows us that 1 in every 3 children born in the developing world don’t reach their full developmental potential; both in terms of their cognitive growth and their social-emotional skills. 

The ages of 0-10 is the most critical developmental window of a human being’s life - over 80% of a human’s brain development is done before the age of 10. This means that the early years are the most effective time to build foundational cognitive skills. 

However, while research in this space is robust and shows us exactly how to fix this issue, critical decisions we make about our children as parents and educators are still based on pure guesswork. 

There are three pressing issues that Tilli is well-positioned to solve: 

1. Effectively measuring complex cognitive and social-emotional learning skills at scale 
2. The disconnect between developmental and learning science research and practice (teachers and parents) 
3. Lack of localized, culturally relevant, engaging learning experiences for K-5 settings in South Asia

Tilli is a phy-digital (physical and digital)  learning toolbox that progressively builds and measures 8 of the most foundational cognitive skills from self-awareness to metacognition before a child’s 10th birthday. We bring together three powerful levers: 

1. The joy of play-based learning

2. The power of behavioral sciences

3. and the precision of learning data to help parents and teachers access high-quality, actionable learning interventions geared to each child’s learning progress, gaps, and emotional well-being needs. 

Our thesis is that the most conducive conditions to build foundational skills is when the classroom and the home environments are brought together, which is why Tilli has 3 core components: 

Teachers: Access a robust 5 module upskilling series, a play kit and access to a teacher’s dashboard of both learning data about their class and personalized classroom interventions 

Learner: Play-based learning curriculum, 30 minutes every week

Parents: Parenting tool to help caregivers access learning outcomes data about their child and personalized, research-backed interventions in their local language 

Within just 11 months of launching, Tilli is currently used by over 15,000 learners and families across 21+ schools in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, and Brunei) According to Save the Children 9 out of 10 students who complete just one Tilli learning module show evidence of better self-regulation and anger management. 4 out 5 parents who use Tilli reported that they were able to better manage their own emotions through the personalized interventions Tilli suggested.

See how it works - Tilli Product Demo

Our focus is to serve children from low-income, historically marginalized communities in South Asia during their most critical years of 0-10. For a long time, research, high-quality curricula, and access to personalized learning has been severely restricted to communities that speak English and can afford to pay. We want to ensure that teachers, parents, and learners get access to high-quality learning and personalized interventions during their early years.

We serve 3 core users: 

1. Teachers: according to the World Bank K-5 teachers in South Asia experience a lack of pedagogically sound pre-service training. Our prime focus for every school that uses Tilli is to first give teachers access to a well-designed, pedagogically sound, teacher training program where they get hands-on training on each fundamental cognitive skill and an introduction to both developmental psychology and neurosciences. Alongside training, teachers get access to a learning kit that comprises all the material, play tools, and curricula they need for the full academic year. 

2. Learners: After 2 years of research at the Stanford School of Education, and multiple rounds of user-testing with over 5000 children in India and Sri Lanka, we provide little ones with a completely play-based curriculum, 30 minutes every week. Each weekly intervention is carefully designed to progressively build 1 or 2 cognitive or SEL skills through a 4 staged process called Learn - Apply - Reflect - Measure 

3. Parents: get access to learning data about their child’s progress in an easy-to-understand manner alongside personalized interventions that they could do at home geared towards each child's learning needs. Our parenting tools are powered by an LLM rag solution.

Tilli has a team of 10 bringing expertise in learning sciences, game design/development, machine learning, developmental psychology, and social-emotional learning. 

Kavindya, Co-Founder & Head of Product at Tilli, began as a community teacher in one of Sri Lanka's toughest neighborhoods, where she witnessed firsthand the impact of poor teaching and the absence of social-emotional learning interventions. Her background is in developmental psychology and learning sciences. In 2020, she led a Stanford study on at-home SEL interventions that led to the creation of Tilli. Her research and design work has focused on designing impactful, low-tech learning experiences for deep rural communities like her own. 

Akshika, CTO at Tilli is a Ph.D. and Machine learning engineer with expertise in computer science, healthcare, privacy, and HCI. His research at King's College London explored multimodal electronic health record data where he built models for identifying patient clusters with multiple long-term conditions. Before this, he worked as a lead data scientist in the growth hacking team of WSO2 where he used multimodal user data to understand user behavior.

Brian (Lead Visual /game artist) has 6+ years of experience designing engaging educational games for kids. He designed 7 educational games for Playshifu and created a range of hyper-casual games including TapIn that focused on COVID awareness building. Brian brings a unique skill set building engaging characters and environments for kids.

Mohan, Unity Developer at Tilli, previously designed and developed 15+ games and 10+ apps, winning a Top 10 game design award from Voodoo. He was the level designer for the award-winning game 'Bloom' and worked as a software developer at TechM. Skilled in game programming and design, proficient in C#, C++, and Java.

Sukanta is an Associate Game Developer at Tilli. After completing his graduation specializing in Animation and Game Development, he worked with Ubisoft and EA Codemasters in various roles in both QA and Production before joining. He excels at solving and fixing critical problems efficiently and effectively, along with end to end optimization solutions to offer better end user experience.

Piumi is Tilli's Head of Operations and Partnerships with a background in Aerospace avionics and Aviation management, coupled with a CIPD Associate Diploma in People Management. With 6+ years in Sri Lanka's social sector, 3 years in HR and experience at Changi Airport, she excels in detail-oriented operations.

Adiesha is an Operations Associate that blends academic excellence with strategic acumen. With dual bachelor's degrees in Economics (UOL) and Statistics (USJP), and an associate member of CIM UK, Adiesha helps to steer operations, marketing, and L&D with precision.

Tushar works on the design and implementation of the TillixTools project. He has been working in the social sector for almost 7 years, working on large scale programs across different states in India. His expertise lies in Design, Strategy and Partnerships.

Ishani, a Game Designer at Tilli, began with her Graduation Project and now works full-time. Trained at Anant National University as a Product Designer, she is fervent about using play for teaching and learning.

This quarter we hit our milestone of reaching 15,000+ learners and caregivers across our learning tools. We’ve reached 21 schools in India and Sri Lanka and hit 80,000 USD in revenue since launching our paid model in 2023. We’re operating a model where for every Tilli license sold, we’re able to provide another free of charge. 

Currently, we have launched the following; 4 learning and measurement modules for kids measuring 3 of our 8 target skills, a parent’s dashboard tracking data across these 4 modules, and a teacher’s dashboard. For example; the learning modules include several features that leverage natural language Processing (NLP) and Key Phrase Detection to understand a child’s emotion and most ideal self-management strategy. 

An impact report from Save the Children showed that after using Tilli, 9 out of 10 children were able to demonstrate healthy coping mechanisms to manage their anger. 4 out of 5 parents were able to better regulate their own emotions through our learning experiences. 95% of kids completed the entire learning experience and 85% of parents reported that they had an honest and meaningful conversation with their kids after completing just one play-based Tilli module.

In 2023 alone, we won both the Launch and Impact awards at SXSW-Edu; the largest ed-tech conference in the world. We won the highly competitive Tools Competition by Schmidt Futures and received investment to expand our work in measurement. Tilli also became a UNICEF Innovation Fund portfolio company for their AI/Data Science Fund raising seed funding of $300,000 and even won a design award from IDEO and Sesame Workshop for one of our learning modules.

We’re mainly looking for advice, mentorship and partners to help us in the following x areas 

1. Building scalable processes: we are now at the phase where our pilots are converting into multi-year partnerships, and we’re beginning to expand into multiple schools that have vastly different structures and resource capabilities. We need guidance on how we might streamline our operations and build user-friendly processes for aspects like school onboarding, learner success, and product delivery. 

2. Building values-aligned partnerships to scale in South Asia: we’re looking at introductions, ideas, and case studies that can help us explore unique partnerships to help us reach our target of 10 million Tilli learners by 2030.

3. Navigating state bureaucracies: we’re one of the early entrants into this space in South Asia, which means we’re often in policy conversations with state and local governments that are just beginning to formalize new early child education policies and social-emotional learning frameworks. How do we successfully navigate these negotiations while remaining focused on our core vision?

1. Our core differentiator is our ability to measure foundational cognitive and social-emotional learning skills. We believe that what doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get done. Many tools in this space are focused on curriculum and content but have found it difficult to crack one of the most complex issues in education - measuring if learning and behavior change has happened. This is especially tough when it comes to measuring skills like empathy, critical thinking, and metacognition which are rather subjective and where there is no right or wrong answer. Our ability to combine ML models, and peer-reviewed measurement frameworks with gamified learning allows us to measure learning in stealthy ways and design curricula personalized to each child’s unique journey. This also allows us to partner with other like-minded content and curricula creators in this space to improve learning outcomes collectively.
2. Our holistic approach to cognitive and SEL brings together teachers, parents, and learners into one learning journey - When working with communities that are at-risk and from lower socio-economic backgrounds it’s crucial that we focus on up-skilling both teachers and parents with data, actionable research and easy to implement interventions 
3. Co-created with local educators - From day 1 we’ve adopted a co-creative approach to learning design. Every single learning and assessment module we design goes through a series of co-creation rounds with local teachers, parents, psychologists, learning designers, and most importantly kids. This ensures that our content is culturally relevant, nuanced, and in local languages (and not a mere translation with English as the reference point)

Why: Our thesis is quite simple - Over 80% of a human’s brain development happens before the age of 10. This is the single most important developmental window for a person’s life particularly for building foundational cognitive and social-emotional skills from self-regulation to empathy. We aim to ensure that every 10-year-old is developmentally on track by the time they enter 6th grade. 

Who: We focus on a systems-level approach where we target the 3 most important levers towards transforming - educators, parents and learners by bringing together play, behavioral sciences, and data towards an outcomes-driven, personalized learning journey that builds 8 of the most foundational cognitive and learning skills before a child’s 10th Birthday. 

What: A 3-component learning ecosystem that includes:

(a) A play-based curriculum for learners that progressively builds and measures 8 foundational skills from self-awareness to metacognition 

(b) A teacher toolkit including a physical learning kit with creative teaching aides and a digital dashboard to view student learning data (including both learning outcomes data and well-being indicators) and receive personalized classroom interventions and risks

(C) A parenting tool that connects parents with learning data (e.g how has your child’s self-awareness skills improved), well-being indicators (e.g: your child’s emotional health), and personalized interventions (e.g: A Bedtime routine that helps build self regulation) in local languages

• We aim to ensure that 10 million children in South Asia are developmentally on track by their 10th birthday 

• We measure impact through 3 main indicators

  • Reach: Number of learners, parents, educators, and school leaders who we reach through Tilli 

  • Learning outcomes data: this allows us to understand if learning and behavioral change have occurred within the groups we’ve reached. In learners, we use peer-reviewed assessments to gauge learning progress, gaps, and completion across our 8 skill levels. For teachers, we conduct pre-post training assessments to guage improvements in pedagogical understanding and classroom management skills. For parents we look at self reports and the number of actions they’ve taken based on their child’s learning outcomes and gaps 

  • Engagement: here we aim to gauge if our learning experience is fun, and engaging and leads to completion. Our main metrics for engagement are completion rates, retention scores, and satisfaction ratings.

Tilli is an open-source tech company that is registered as a digital public good. From a tech standpoint, our ethos is to share technology and learning.

Tilli is a phy-digital product which means we have both a range of physical learning that adopt tangible play and 3 digital app-based tools. The learning app used by kids is available on Android, IOS and as a web-app for communities with less than 3G internet access. The back-end is powered by a range of tools like Unity (game design), Firebase (data collection and analysis) The parenting tool leverages an LLM Rag Solution, a Whatsapp API and speech-to-text functionalities to make learning data and research accessible to a range of literacy and language levels of parents. 

We also leverage machine learning models to analyze and interpret the learning data that we gather from student inputs and to subsequently recommend personalized, research-backed interventions for each child’s unique learning needs. For example, we’ve developed an ML model that allows us to analyze the child’s emotional state and past self-regulation behaviors and then recommend a self-management strategy that will help them productively reflect on their emotion and then manage it. This allows the child to progressively build their self-awareness skills and self-regulation habits. Another ML use case we have is using Natural Language Processing and Key Phrase Detection to measure the complexity of a child’s emotional vocabulary and to capture any distress signals. We also leverage Gen-AI to curate personalized parenting and classroom interventions based on a child’s learning data. 

Full-time staff- 6

Part-time staff- 4

4 years

• We’re a south asia team of designers, developers and researchers who have built learning and play experiences for our own communities. 

• We are led by two female, South Asian co-founders and have always maintained gender balance and diversity within our wider team. 

• We’re a remote team, allowing us to have team members from diverse parts of both Sri Lanka and India, we meet once a year for a week long strategy retreat.

• Our leave policy was co-desigend by our team to incoporate the different cultural and religious holidays and practices of our team. We take a rest week off every year to re-set and have a flexible PTO plan that prioritizes mental well-being. 

• Life happens - we encourage our team to take ‘all the time you need’ when a crisis comes their way. We teach kids to be emotionally aware and resilient and we ensure our team does the same.

We’re focused on a B2B business model, with a sliding price scale and a pay it forward model. For every Tilli license we sell, we’re able to provide one at no cost. Our target customers are primary schools and government + INGOs (like UNICEF and Save the Children) focused on early childhood education. Schools and organizations purchase yearly student licenses on a sliding scale of $6-$45 per child/per year depending on the market and product bundle they opt for. Each license comes with a holistic learning suite - a learning kit and dashboard for the teacher, a learning app that the child uses at home and a parenting tool for the caregiver. We have already sold over 4,000+ subscriptions. We record a 40-50% profit margin on each subscription. Our paying customers include both high-fee paying private schools and affordable private schools, for public schools in deep rural communities we partner with government partners or large INGOs. Irrespective of the zip code and the payment method, every child gets access to the same quality of learning

Tilli operates as a social enterprise, which means our aim is to build a financially sustained business model with a high quality product offering that our customers are willing to pay for. We have seen the negative impacts of traditional development agencies in communities like ours who are forced to operate based on donor priorities rather than community needs and this is a pitfall we’re committed to avoiding. As of now we’re focused on a B2B business model and sell to primary schools, large INGOs (like Save the Children) and governments. We record a 40-50% margin on every Tilli license sold and are post-revenue after 11 months of launching our paid model. 

We also have two strategic investors - the UNICEF Innovation Fund and Schmidt Ventures whose funding has supported our product development and learning research functions.